


Inevitably We Suffer

by Vrunka



Series: Transgressions, Sins, the Unforgivable [3]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Body Horror, Catholic Imagery, Gore, Graphic Description of Injury, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-28
Updated: 2017-02-28
Packaged: 2018-09-27 09:29:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9997823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vrunka/pseuds/Vrunka
Summary: The cock crows.The end of all things and the life of the world to come.A figure moves in the rubble, struggles to his feet. The crowning of thorns. The bitter denial.The score is even now.





	

Resurrected.

That's the word for it.

Dust motes, debris, falling. Highlighted by the sun. Collapsing. Spiraling. Dying.

Jack blinks.

His body hurts. His whole body. A single, screaming ache. He squints against the light, the sun, down here in the basement where it should not, cannot be.

There was a roof here.

There isn't now.

He begins to sit up and his ribs protest. Dust in his lungs, a hacking fit of coughing that leaves him groaning, rolling on the ground, clutching his sides.

There is blood beneath him. Tacky and warm and red.

And under that, familiar tile.

Jack forces himself upright this time.

There is a shard of metal embedded in his side. It tears and rips every time he breathes. The end of it is crooked, poking out of him like a bone, gun metal grey.

Jack wonders at his own sense of calm. His own tasteless pain. He wonders when he pulls it out if the panic will kick in.

He grips the edge of it, his other hand braced against the bottom of the wound. He closes his eyes.

He pulls.

The metal slides free with a sickening sound. A wet noise. It drops from his nerveless fingers, clangs and bounces against the tile. Fresh blood spattering.

Jack shudders.

Sunlight on the back of his neck.

Still no panic.

What happened?

Easy enough to remember. Gabriel in his face, the two of them, grappling. They had been yelling. Accusations and denials.

Denials.

Gabriel.

Jesus Christ.

Jack presses his hand tight to his side. The oozing, woozy feeling of his own blood between his fingers. The tattered edges of his uniform flutter against his skin.

He isn't worried.

The wounds always heal.

He closes his eyes. Tight. Squeezing. Somewhere, in the debris, in the wreck there is a sound.

A cock crowing.

Jack shudders.

Impossible. Impossible.

He shifts, gets his feet under him. Sways dangerously. He catches himself, bracing his hand on a person-sized chunk of concrete and metal. Pipes, leaking water, a slow drip.

Jack slips his hand under the spray. Wets his fingers. Wipes them across his brow.

The cool kiss of it. Down his cheeks. Baptism and rebirth, fucking sentimental.

His side aches, but it is the familiar sting of knitting now. Muscles remembering their place, their function.

Resurrected.

The noise has continued. Piercing in the quiet of the disaster. Not a rooster perhaps, but coughing; a human sound. Distinctly pained. Broken. Explosive.

Explosion. That's right. Jack curls his fingers tighter against the chunk of ruin.

He heads toward the sound. He recognizes some of the wreck as he walks. A briefing table, snapped in half, paperwork crumpled and dirt covered and unreadable now. A training locker, bent, useless. Fallen through the collapsed floor above. The whole ceiling is not gone, but Jack tries to stick to the open spaces.

The structure still standing groans, sways as drunkenly as he is.

He needs to get out of here.

Instead he looks at his feet, keeps moving toward the noise.

Impossible for Gabe to have been thrown this far and, as Jack picks his way across the rubble, it becomes clearer that he was not. Blood. Under his boots. A trail of it.

Jack bites his lip.

He looks up.

And there, ahead of him, dragging himself over another rise of fallen ceiling, is Gabe.

Resurrected.

Only not.

His legs.

Christ his legs.

Dangling behind him. The angles are wrong. Too wrong. It's nothing the serum won't fix, eventually, but the sight curdles in Jack's stomach. Turns over. And over.

"Gabe!"

Gabe flinches. He does not turn around. And Jack, somewhere in his own abused and aching body, finds it in him to run.

He slips once, in the dust, in the wreckage. Bangs his knee painfully against the floor. But it means nothing.

Gabe has stopped crawling. His shoulders are shaking. Jack can see his hands, digging into the rubble. Blood on his fingers. Missing nails. Torn loose from his dragged journey across the destruction, probably.

"Gabe," he says again. His voice catches. Dusty. He coughs again, forces himself forward. "Gabe, please."

Please what?

He doesn't know.

Gabe rolls over. Grunting as he does so. His legs twitch, but are otherwise still. Caught on one another.

There is blood down Gabe's chin. His throat. The front of his uniform. Blackwatch's insignia is lost under it. There is a piece of metal, similar to Jack's, growing out of Gabe's left shoulder, his chest. The same grey, the same thickness. Whatever it was; chunk of wall, deadly shard of piping; was indiscriminate.

"You're not dead," Gabe says. His voice is just as hoarse as Jack's. Something filtered from under a floor. A radio channel, not quite tuned.

Jack reaches him. Kneels at his side.

"I'm not," he says. He swallows. Touches Gabe's cheek. The anger from earlier, the betrayal, the hurt, Jack doesn't know where it has gone.

Like the panic.

His body cannot accept it. The here and now is too close and too intimate.

The shard of metal in Gabe's torso is bigger than the piece that had speared Jack. Lanced him.

Pierced him.

Gabe's broken knees. His shattered shins. The clots of blood on his palms. A crown of thorns.

Jack bites his lip, drags his thoughts to solutions.

There isn't time for this.

"You're not dead, either," Jack says, in a rush. He presses his fingers tighter when Gabe's eyelids flutter closed. "Hey, listen to me."

Reluctantly, Gabe's eyes reopen.

"We're gonna make it out of this, okay?"

Gabe smiles. It is not a happy thing. A hollow, painful twisting of his lips. "Jack," he says, "Jesus Christ, Boy Scout, you don't give it up ever, do you?"

Jack shakes his head. "Afraid not. Something of a..."

"Shut up, Jack."

Jack bites his lip. Gabe draws in a breath. Something in his chest gurgles. His breathing is too thick. The large shard of metal vibrates with every movement.

The medic in Jack, the analytical eye of the soldier, recognizes the futility of Gabe's position. The hopelessness. Liquid in the lungs. Blood most likely. Will the serum mend it quick enough.

It's anyone's guess.

"I'm glad you're alive," Gabe says. "For what it's worth."

It is not worth much. But it is good to know that the weird, horrible sense of calm has settled in Gabe as well. That here, at the end of things, they can still be gentle with one another.

"Gabe..."

Gabe shakes his head, flinching into the motion. His body going rigid, going soft. "I'm not done. I'm...I only just..."

"You're not gonna die, Gabe."

"I'm already fucking dead, Jackie. Ribs are broken. Something punctured."

"Overwatch will be here, they'll--"

"Fuck Overwatch and fuck you. This was always how it...you couldn't just leave, when I asked. Of course you couldn't. Had to stick around for it."

Jack shakes his head. He can still hear the accusations, if he closes his eyes. If he concentrates. The argument they'd been having.

A traitor, a liar. The two of them. A Judas, a Pilot.

What does it matter now anyway?

Jack will not ask him if he planned it. The answer is obvious enough. They haven't really had each other's backs in years. It probably didn't take much prodding for Gabe to stick the knife in Jack's.

The whole situation with Rockefort must have felt like a knife in Gabe's.

An eye for an eye and the whole world is blind.

And Gabe is dying.

And Overwatch, whatever is left of them, will not be here in time.

Jack turns his hand, grazes his knuckles over Gabe's lips.

"I'm sorry," Gabe says. The skin of his lips is chapped, rough under Jack's hand. "You need to go. I don't...I don't want you to." His lips move. His back arches.

There is the warm spread of blood across Jack's fingers. Seamlessly.

Gabe twitches, heaves. A cough that will not manifest. He turns to the side, flips himself, curling inward. Jack's hands hover. Helplessly.

Where can he touch?

What can he do?

Nothing.

Nothing.

The fit subsides. Gabe's breath rattles from between his teeth. Wet. Dripping. He raises a shaking hand, wipes it across his mouth.

"I never wanted you to see me like this." Gabe takes a shuddering inhale.

Jack can't see his face.

Jack doesn't want to.

"I'm sorry," Jack says. "Gabe...I'm so sorry."

Without a specific the words come easy. A lie, a lie, hallelujah, hallelujah.

He is sorry, in a way.

He never meant for it to turn out this way. He's pretty sure neither of them did.

Gabe closes his eyes. His hands curl in the wreckage. Concrete scrapings, shards of glass.

Jack takes his hand.

They were supposed to watch out for each other. That was the promise. Jack doesn't know--can't exactly remember--when that stopped being the case.

When they forgot that.

Gabe's hand is cold.

This is death in slow motion.

And maybe there isn't a cross but Jack can follow the stations of it. The Way of Sorrows. Jesus is condemended to death. Jesus falls and Jesus falls.

Jack bites his lip. Hard enough the skin protests, stabbing lines of pain where his incisor catches wrong.

He shakes the hand in his grip. "Gabe," he says. "Please."

He doesn't know how long he sits there. Cradling Gabe's hand in his. Wishing that he hadn't been the one to wield the hammer.

Gabe's chest moves with his breathing. Stuttering motion of his muscles, that damned shard of metal. The killing blow.

Jack squeezes Gabe's fingers between his own. The bones seem to creak, but Jack doesn't notice.

A sound in the distance.

The flapping of wings.

Gabe's breathing has stopped. His eyes are open and glassy. The dust motes settle on his face, in his eyes. Horribly so.

The sound persists.

Echoing.

A motor, not wings.

The whirring of helicopter.

And Gabe is dead.

Too late, too late. Hallelujah. Hallelujah.

What else is left for him?

Jack forces himself away from Gabe's body. Gabe's corpse. Gabe's death. Gabe's crucifixion.

He stumbles through the rubble.

He doesn't know where he is going.

But he goes.

And he does not look back.

Somewhere, a cock is crowing. An angel descends. A death is reversed.

But Jack does not look back.

Resurrection. Baptisms of fire. A broken soul, mended and twisted and shattered further. A mistake. A blasphemy.

Resurrected.

That's the word for it.

Hallelujah.

**Author's Note:**

> Another pretentious Catholic R76 piece??? I guessss it is.
> 
> This series has been such a vent piece for me but everyone has been so supportive; I can't thank you guys enough.
> 
> As always: if I missed any tags lemme know, or if you just want to say hi I'm always reading (and rereading and rereading) comments left here and I'm always on Tumblr @vrunkas
> 
> Thanks guys!!


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